The present invention relates broadly to broadband tapered slot antennas, and in particular to a planar integrated opto-electronic transceiver.
There is considerable interest in high-performance mixers and receivers for the microwave, millimeter, and submillimeter-wave regions which will also be rugged, reliable, and can be mass produced at low cost. Applications range from radio astronomy to large military imaging systems. Since the packaging of existing high-performance transceivers is quite labor intensive, they are expensive and time consuming to produce. At frequencies above 100 GHz, conventional waveguide mixer circuits for transceiver units have become increasingly difficult to make, losses increase rapidly, and circuit elements are located at electrically long distances leading to large and uncontrolled parasitic elements. Monolithic integration allows circuit elements to be located electrically close so that circuit losses are reduced and parasitic elements can be controlled. Moreover, novel coupling and impedance-matching configurations are made possible by using the precision of photolithographically defined circuit elements. There clearly exists a need for high performance and efficient transmitting and receiving units which operate in the millimeter wave region.
In the prior art, the interest in optical generation and sampling of radiated electromagnetic transients has been demonstrated in a large variety of structures. The descriptions of these structures and results may be found in the following references:
G. Mourou, C. V. Stancampiano and D. Blumethl, "Picosecond Microwave Pulse Generation", Appl. Phys. Letter, 38, pp. 470-472 (1981).
D. H. Auston, and P. R. Smith, "Generation and Detection of Waves by Picosecond Photoconductivity", Appl. Phys. Lett., 43, pp 631-633 (1983).
D. H. Auston, K. P. Cheung, and P. R. Smith, "Picosecond Photoconducting Hertzian Dipoles", Appl. Phys. Lett., 45, pp. 284-286, (1984).
G. Mourou, C. C. Stancampiano, A. Antonetti, and A. Orszag, "Picosecond Microwave Pulses Generated with a Subpicosecond Laser-Driven Semiconductor Switch", Appl. Phys. Lett., pp 295-296 (1981).
M. G. Li, C. H. Lee, A. Caraglanian, E. A. Greene, C. Y. She, P. Polak-Dingles and A. Rosen, "Direct DC to RF Conversion by Impulse Excitation of a Resonant Cavity", pp 216-219, Proceedings of the Topical Meeting on Picosecond Electronics and Optoelectronics, Lake Tahoe, Nevada, Springer-Verlag (1985).
C. S. Chang, H. J. Rhec, Chi H. Lee, A. Rosen and H. Davis, "Kilovolt Sequence Waveform Generation by Picosecond Optoelectronic Switching in Silicon", pp 220-223, ibid.
R. Heidmann, T. H. Pfieffer and D. Jager, "Optoelectronically Pulsed Slot-Line Antennas" Electron Lett., 19, pp 316-317 (1983).
The present invention solves many of the prior art problems and provides an optically operated planar integrated transceiver apparatus.